>----- Original Message -----
>From: "Rahul Nabar" <rpnabar at gmail.com>
>To: "Beowulf Mailing List" <beowulf at beowulf.org>
>Sent: Tuesday, May 12, 2009 2:19:33 PM GMT -06:00 US/Canada Central
>Subject: [Beowulf] recommendations for cluster upgrades
>>I'm currently shopping around for a cluster-expansion and was shopping
>for options. Anybody out here who's bought new hardware in the recent
>past? Any suggestions? Any horror stories?
>>We've been using Dell SC1435's with Quad-Core AMD 2354 Opterons @
>2.2GHz. 16 Gig RAM.
The Nehalem-based Xeon 5500 series of native quad-core processors
from Intel with a 3 channel DDR3 memory controller on-chip, cc-NUMA
capability supported by Intel's response to AMD's HT, QPI and with an
on-chip Power Control Unit that actively manages idle and active power
consumption is a dramatic leap forward for Intel in this space, eliminating
most (all?) of the micro-architectural advantages that AMD since it introduced
Opteron. This is especially true if you have bandwidth heavy applications
because, as has been discussed here already, Nehalem has 3 faster
DDR3 memory channels on-chip.
Most benchmarks I have seen put Nehalem ahead of AMD's comparable
Shanghai native quad-core, although you could wait for the 6-core AMD
Instanbul which does somewhat better than Shanghai even with its further
strained and somewhat lagging DDR2 memory subsystem. Does a socket
upgrade make since with the boards that you already have? This is the
choice that AMD hopes you will make. Intel, on the other hand, wants to
look at the Xeon 5500's performance and power management, and go for
the forklift upgrade.
rbw
--
Rahul
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